black fire's burning bright
by die by thirty
Summary: She only ever kills the men that look like him.
1. glamorous but i'm deranged

It's in the flashes of blinding white, blinding yellow.  
Light is a damning thing.  
Her fingers slip from the blinds, and the aching brightness slips back, leaving her in darkness.

She is shaking, she knows this much. Her mouth is burning, tasting of bile and leftover traces of alcohol.  
Her head bangs up against the wall, and there is the feeling of fire.  
In her veins. Coursing hot and shimmering down the sharp planes of her face -(_just skin and bone, skin and bone_)-  
in the blood trailing from her knuckles and their swollen bruises. (_but i think it's home, home, home_)

Her fingers wrap around the death cold barrel of a pistol

& she smirks.

* * *

Her mouth tastes of mint, and the world is spinning to a steady clack-clack of heels on pavement. The sun shifts away from her eyes, covered in thick black shades.  
A soft breeze licks at the back of her neck, stirring up chopped-short and dizzyingly free hair,  
(_it's pink, the pink of blood and milk and chaotic things_)

The pistol hides in her jacket, and her mouth is spread in a blood-colored smile.

(_First kills are considered the hardest aren't they?, she thinks as she remembers the almost-panic, the adrenaline, the thrill of it all._  
_She's got his money now, and he's got his grave._)

* * *

Seven different states, nineteen different men, and a new smoking habit.  
She only goes for them, the ones with black hair and silent eyes, and it's a deranged game.  
_Make him love you, love you, love you, put a bullet in the heart that once beat for you, you, you._

It's easy.

She breathes out into the night air, watching the glittering stars above the endless California wastelands, leaning against a rusted, weather-worn sign, peeling paint barely hanging onto the metal.  
Her fingers grip a different coldness: a locket.

She only ever kills the men that look like him.

* * *

She doesn't know how long she's been doing this, but the seasons have whirled around in confused spirals around her: green, green, yellow, white, repeat, repeat. But she knows it's been 48 states, 62 men that were all the same but different, and she has a smoker's cough that interrupts breaths of sweet air pounding through her lungs every so often.

She thinks it must be spring, possibly.  
She's wearing a crown of flowers and dead leaves in her hair, and it's grown longer than it had ever been, stringy and falling in bright strands to her waist.

& there's him, the one she's killed 62 times over in her head and someone else has taken the bullet.  
There's shock in his eyes; she's not supposed to be the serial killer he's been chasing. She's supposed to have some happy family, a husband and maybe two kids, somewhere back east, without him.  
Living the life they never could.

He can't bring himself to point the gun at her, and she strokes his cheek.  
She kisses him, slow and soft, and as he kisses back she breaks away and smiles like she knows something he doesn't, and that something is very very very sad and he doesn't to think what it might be.

"I think you told me once...no story has a happy ending."  
Her words ring into the empty air, into the dampness of a molding, abandoned apartment with broken windows and half-rotten blinds.  
Outside, police sirens pass and fade. 

"I believe you." 

It's a short gunshot, absorbed into the bare, rotten boards, and he catches her as she falls.

* * *

(Inspiration - Kinda Outta Luck, Serial Killer, both by Lana Del Rey (I highly suggest listening to both of these while reading))


	2. wearing our vintage misery

She's ten years old, with an orphanage for a home and a beautiful smile.  
(_teetering, always teetering on cracking, falling. She stretches her smiles wide to hold herself together_).

He's a year older, with hair and eyes as dark as an oncoming storm.  
(_he was electric, something burning so bright before vanishing beneath the skin again and again and again_).

They are both products of misery, so they hold each others hands sometimes, pressing tight and turning their knuckles pale. They're both lifelines, in their own ways.

* * *

She's kicking her feet in the blue-green water of the river, restless. The sun hides behind a thick blanket of filmy silver clouds, and her legs are streaked red from the cold. He watches her silently, memorizing her, from the tangled pink strands of her short hair to the silver gleam of the switchblade she's cupping in her lap.  
He doesn't want to forget before she's ripped away from him too. So he doesn't speak, almost never speaks.

"_Where do you think we're going? In the future, I mean_."

Her question is quiet, vanishing into the air without answer. She sighs and lays her head in his lap. A lot of their conversations are like that, empty and gone. She doesn't entirely mind.

* * *

She is seventeen and pretty. She hides the dark fog of insomnia, sleeplessness that looks like bruises beneath her eyelids, with make up, smearing it on like warpaint.

* * *

"Have you ever thought about what it must be like, killing someone?" His gaze snaps to her, where she's perched at the edge of his bed, looking at her hands, the lines crosshatching like scars. "Ever wonder how watching someone's life slip away would feel?"  
He covers her hands with his, his mouth resting near her ear.  
"Don't think of it."  
He presses a kiss to the side of her dry mouth, glides his lips across her collarbone, lacing his fingers through hers.  
"Don't think of it."

.

(_at the age of five, she found her parents in a pool of blood, and she feels like she can never wipe away the redness of it on her hands, neverevereverever get rid of their deaths, even when she scrubs her hands raw._

_at the age of six, his family died in an arson, and the dancing of black night, the burning red, the burning yellow, and acrid smoke pirouette in screams in his dreams.)  
_.  
._  
_

They fall back on the bed and try to forget in the warmth of themselves.

.

Later, he holds her in his arms as the sun dies outside his window, twirling her impossibly soft hair around his fingers. They're messy, sweaty, and as she falls asleep he kisses her forehead.

He doesn't think he could ever stop kissing her, ever stop trying to breathe her in.

* * *

(_he lies to himself_)

(_he leaves her_)

* * *

He thinks it's for the best, when he steps into the airport, headed to the police academy three states away.  
_She deserves better than me_, he thinks. He tries to convince himself of it.

The airport is full of greyness, metallic and all business, and lonely for the hundreds of people moving restlessly in it. He leans back on a hard bench and looks at the ceiling.  
.

She was sitting in the kitchen of their small, cheap apartment that smelled like smoke and candle wax and the vanilla Febreze she sprayed to cover it all up when he told her he was leaving. She'd had her long legs dangling off the kitchen counter, sitting in one of his old white shirt with a head of tangled hair and...

and she had glared at him.

There was something chaotic about her posture, the way her spine had stiffened and she'd slid off the counter. Her eyes turned hard, sharp, and there was something wildly, unfamiliarly, violent in the way she looked at him.

He doesn't want to remember, so he doesn't. Flight 42 lifts off the runway and as the asphalt, as the trees and the people drift into something smaller and smaller he closes his eyes and refuse to admit his soul aches.

* * *

He's twenty-one and a promising new cadet at the police academy. He beats his bones into the ground for a reason he can't even remember.

His fists crush the sparse, muddy grass and the rain soaks his back and he doesn't remember, he doesn't remember, _he doesn't remember!  
._

_His dreams tell lies of smoke and fire and the chaos of a girl with pink hair._

* * *

She's twenty, and two years into a medical degree when she disappears.  
This one is just a glimmer, an echo of a boy she loved, all obsidian eyes and hair and that sort of sweet, honeyed smile that comes from someone with an innocent life. He smiles, and he's not her boy.  
She bruises his lips with her own, brushes them, and pulls away. Teasing him.  
He reaches out for her in the small space of their motel bedroom, in it's curtained shadows, and she puts a bullet in his heart.

.

The shot is jarring, shuddering in her bones.  
She decides she likes blood on her hands.

* * *

**AN:  
So I decided to continue this. To me, this isn't really at all a fluid timeline, or a fluid story. I'll probably be re-writing and re-writing the same concept over and over in all these separate chapters, some long and some short. So, for those of you that are in this for the long ride, let me tell you how much I appreciate it. ~3  
**


	3. all the words are gonna bleed from me

She has this thing; she likes to keep count.

62 men.  
48 states.  
9 slowly dying roses and 9 crumpled and faded daisies she's trying to braid together.  
17 times that rose thorns have drawn blood from her hands, and they're shaking, and the flowers blur in her vision, petals speckled with her blood in the darkness of this abandoned apartment.

It smells like rot in here, and she wipes her eyes on the sleeve of a frayed denim jacket that belonged to someone else.

She doesn't know why she's making this crown, but there's some part of her desperate to create it.  
Is it the thought of spring, of something purely simple and not dead (_something that she didn't kill, something that is not her fault_), that she's chasing after?

Love and innocence is a happy thing, but it's not her reality.  
Her reality is gunpowder, the prospect of lung cancer, and overbearingly loneliness.

.

She likes to keep count, but she can't remember anymore.  
She doesn't know her age, or the time of year. The streets outside her broken windows are damp and black and shining in the city lights. Dark clouds are rumbling across the sky, & she watches their grey underbellies light up with electricity.  
She can't remember his face, and can't recall why she kills.

There, the crown is finished.  
She lifts it up, glimmers of lightning bouncing off the pink and brown of the flowers' barely-clinging-to-life-ness.

Her hair is long and pink and coarse and stringy, tangled and knotted, and the thorns catch in it, and she smiles, tilting her head.

.  
.

She's a demented queen of ruin.

* * *

Her broken little home (_she's only lived in it for two, maybe three days, but it's a place to return to, so she doesn't mind the dust and broken windows and the mold clinging to the walls_) is by a river.  
It's a brown, ruddy thing, full of waste and plastic and the occasional dead fish. It slugs along, and she leans on the windowsill and tries to count the cars that roll by.  
One red, two blue, one green, _wait, was it it three red or three blue?_ She rubs her knuckles against her eyes and waits for a black car.  
It'll be something sleek, made for being bland and stereotypical, but oh-so perfect for fitting into these dark alleys. She supposes that they could try choosing something dented up and rusted, but police are so predictable.  
Some random officer picked up the pattern a few years ago -_young male in his twenties, black hair, black eyes, murdered murdered murdered_- & she likes to play with them.  
Always a hair away, or never even close.  
Almost caught her, or tripped over their own feet in the chase.

But now she doesn't want to play this game anymore, and her bones feel old and tired and killing isn't something she enjoys anymore.

.

Ah.

Whoever's in this car is trying so hard to be subtle, but she sees him anyway. He rolls down the street in his shiny, rain-soaked car, and he's already made a mistake.  
His brights are off.  
He doesn't want to draw attention with his headlights, but their lack already confirms her suspicions.  
It's over.

The thought feels like a relief, like an exhalation of air she never knew she was holding in, and she turns away from the window and its mostly shattered glass.

* * *

It feels too easy.  
It feels too easy and he is paranoid, shutting off his lights and strolling the car around the curve, and then walking back in the rain.  
The stairs are creaky and dusty, and he could've sworn he saw a rat walking across a dilapidated beam. He checks three floors, gun in hand, before he sees a door on the fourth floor, cracked open and lit from within.

& so he pushes it open.

.

There is a candle, just one of those plain white emergency candles, sitting on a floorboard, a flickering tongue of flame casting a thin trail of dancing smoke into the air.  
There is a chair by the door as well, wooden and armless.

Her voice is something almost coarse, like a pretty ribbon frayed by time and misuse, and it scares him.

"_Hello_."

.

* * *

**AN: Okay, so as I've said before this is not linear, and my writing's a piece of ess aech eye tee**


	4. run boy run

Her words bounce off the walls, a cacophony of muttered sentences, blurring and tangling all together.

_There was one detective who managed to find me...and lose me, I never let him catch me...friendly, if a bit foolish, y'know?...and then he stopped playing...our games were fun...I put a knife in his throat, all the way to the hilt..._

_You're like him._

The thin figure in the shadows rises up, seamless in the dark and the flashing city lights, gleaming **yellow **_yellow_** red** _white_ **red **against her skin.  
Thunder is crackling and this murderer is grinning in the lack of light.

_"You're like him_."

A crack of purple lightning illuminates the small room for the space of a heartbeat, and it feels like that to him.  
A heart beating in the violence of the electricity outside, in the image of something frail and deadly with blood dripping from its hands, and how his sped up in his chest -_thump_thump_thump_thump_thump_thump_thump-_.

& then he thinks that thought, admits the fear.

_I never should have come._

but she's grinning and her hair is _pink _(_why is that familiar?)_ and she's leaping across the room, grabbing for his gun.

.

.

There's a cock of a pistol, cold against the skin of another person's skull.  
.

'  
_I'm sorry, there's been a change of plan. I'm not dying today_."

* * *

**AN: Okay, this was more than a tad rushed (just like the other chapters, ha) and very short but I'm still writing this darn thing.**


	5. so many ways to die

_Time is a fluid, ever-changing thing, and it is so utterly finnicky, really. If you forgot to brush your teeth one morning, that extra slip of time could create something, like if you had bothered to put toothpaste on the bristles versus not, that maybe that sliver could have saved you from an accident, or created the accident you barely slipped by, unknowing._

_Footsteps can change your life, that you took long steps instead of short ones.  
There are three hundred million endings to a single day.  
_

* * *

_1._  
His shiny black car door has a problem with staying shut, and she slams it hard enough the window glass rattles.  
The car is just like him, just perfect for him, rotting beneath all that beautiful black paint.

They are out in a pasture, and she can feel the traces of the bygone storm in the wet grass tangling itself around her ankles. The sun is sliding down, down out of sight, leaving blood streaks in the darkening lavender sky.

A cigarette perches between her teeth, leaving rivulets of smoke in the dewy air.

She sighs, and snuffs it out on the car hood, before she pops the trunk.

She buries the sixty-fifth man, and it's over.

* * *

_2._  
He wakes up in that stale apartment, and she's on the run but not on the run, because she's walking.

Her boots clack slow and leisurely down the damp black concrete as epilepsy-inducing advertisements blare their vibrant colors above her and car lights blur red and yellow as they stream past in rows like glittering ants, the white noise of traffic in her ears.  
She's tired, so tired of running and the taste that lingers in the air after she pulls out a gun, but she knows something else now.  
She grappled a gun from the one she started this all for (..._there's a hollow feeling in her chest; she should've killed him, should've kissed him, should've screamed. he'd been all she'd ever had and he abandoned her butthatwasherfaulttoo and oh god she feels like screaming because of the NOISE in her head_...) and she hadn't wanted to die.

She's tired, but she's not going to die in a prison, in a chair by lethal injection.  
She'll die when they catch her, surround her, and she'll be gone in a flash of sparks and a thunderclap.

_-lll-_

There's a dark red splotch on his forehead, his eyebrow is split and bleeding, and there's a black trickle of blood drying in a smear from his nose. He stumbles out of that old building, heart beating like a drum.

She had been..._familiar_.

* * *

_3._  
He manages to grab the gun from her and that was all it took.  
A point.  
A click.  
Just a small bullet buried in her skull.

His chest heaves and he wipes blood off his face with his sleeve. She is crumpled next to him, small and pink and bloody, the flowers falling off her crown.  
It's not the first time he's killed someone, but the shot is still ringing in his ears and his hands are shaking and he _knows_ those eyes that were peering through him just a moment ago.

Those eyes were worn and tired and etched with horrors...and the soft crystal green of a clear stream.

She was on her side and half-lidded eyes stared glassily into space, and _HE KNOWS HER _and he can taste vomit in the back of his mouth._  
He knows her he knows her he knows her, he knows those eyes, that tangled pink hair_ _he_ **_knows_** _her_!

The court gives her an unmarked grave in a public funeral plot, and he is the only one at the burial.  
He stares numbly at the dirt, and after the final shovelful of dirt is patted down he walks away.

* * *

**AN**: Somebody kill me I am awful at attempting to write. I'm sorry you read this.


End file.
